Category Archives: Donald Trump

Millions join women’s marches in an historic international rebuke of Donald Trump

 

The Washington Post reports: Millions of women gathered in Washington and cities around the country and the world Saturday to mount a roaring rejoinder to the inauguration of President Donald Trump. What started as a Facebook post by a Hawaii retiree became a historic international rebuke of new president that packed cities large and small — from London to Los Angeles, Paris to Park City, Utah, Miami to Melbourne, Australia.

In Chicago, the demonstration was overwhelmed by its own size, forcing officials to curtail its planned march when the crowd threatened to swamp the planned route.

The Washington organizers, who originally sought a permit for a gathering of 200,000, said Saturday that as many as a half million people participated. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: By early afternoon, the number of people who had taken Metro Saturday was approaching half a million, Metro said.

More than 470,000 people had taken Metro by 1 p.m. Saturday, in what officials say is an unprecedented number of riders for a weekend. The crowds surpassed the ridership on Inauguration Day, and even ridership on a regular weekday. [Continue reading…]

 

USA Today reports: According to a sister march webpage, an estimated 2.6 million people took part in 673 marches in all 50 states and 32 countries, from Belarus to New Zealand — with the largest taking place in Washington.

The crowds were so large in some cities that marching was almost impossible. In Chicago, organizers halted the march and rallied at Grant Park instead as crowds swelled to 150,000, although thousands still marched. In New York City, the number was 200,000; in Boston, media reported more than 100,000 people marching in Boston Common. In Oakland, Calif., police estimated that about 60,000 people took part in the women’s march. San Francisco’s rally was scheduled to begin at 3 pm local time, with a march at 5 pm.

In D.C., the huge crowds come a day after empty space was spotted on the National Mall ahead of Trump’s inauguration speech and bare bleachers were noticeable along the inaugural parade route. [Continue reading…]

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Trump, Russia, and the news story that wasn’t

Liz Spayd, Public Editor for the New York Times, writes: Late fall was a frantic period for New York Times reporters covering the country’s secretive national security apparatus. Working sources at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Capitol Hill and various intelligence agencies, the team chased several bizarre but provocative leads that, if true, could upend the presidential race. The most serious question raised by the material was this: Did a covert connection exist between Donald Trump and Russian officials trying to influence an American election?

One vein of reporting centered on a possible channel of communication between a Trump organization computer server and a Russian bank with ties to Vladimir Putin. Another source was offering The Times salacious material describing an odd cross-continental dance between Trump and Moscow. The most damning claim was that Trump was aware of Russia’s efforts to hack Democratic computers, an allegation with implications of treason. Reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers led the effort, aided by others.

Conversations over what to publish were prolonged and lively, involving Washington and New York, and often including the executive editor, Dean Baquet. If the allegations were true, it was a huge story. If false, they could damage The Times’s reputation. With doubts about the material and with the F.B.I. discouraging publication, editors decided to hold their fire.

But was that the right decision? Was there a way to write about some of these allegations using sound journalistic principles but still surfacing the investigation and important leads? Eventually, The Times did just that, but only after other news outlets had gone first.

I have spoken privately with several journalists involved in the reporting last fall, and I believe a strong case can be made that The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had. [Continue reading…]

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White House petition calling for release of Trump tax returns exceeds 100,000 signatures required for response

The Independent reports: A petition calling for the immediate release of Donald Trump’s tax returns has reached the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt a White House response.

The petition, posted to the White House’s official website on Friday, demands for the new President to “immediately release [his] full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance.”

It states: “The unprecedented economic conflicts of this administration need to be visible to the American people, including any pertinent documentation which can reveal the foreign influences and financial interests which may put Donald Trump in conflict with the emoluments clause of the Constitution.” [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump and the New World Order

Der Spiegel reports: A weak, perhaps disintegrating Europe wedged in between the two great powers U.S.A. and Russia, whose presidents get along better than most of their predecessors: For Europe, such a scenario would be the largest foreign and security policy challenge since World War II. For the last 70 years, Europe could depend on having America at its side. Now, this is no longer a certainty.

The power vacuum that America’s withdrawal is creating is particularly welcome to two countries: China and Russia. For the leadership in Beijing, the collapse of the old world order is akin to an act of God: America, China’s last rival on its path to becoming a superpower, is pulling back. Never before have the prospects been as good for the realization of the “Chinese Dream,” which Xi Jinping has made the slogan of his presidency.

Xi spoke of his global vision this week in Davos, at the annual gathering of the world’s economic and financial elite. The rules of international cooperation, he said, must be changed. Beijing isn’t happy with Western dominance of global organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. China, with its population of 1.3 billion and significant economic strength, sees itself as an alternative. Beijing, Xi said, is prepared to take on more responsibility: “History is created by the brave.”

Are we headed for a world in which China — an authoritarian state in which the Communist Party leadership has a firm grip over the economy, controls the media and censors the internet — dominates the new global order? Will the 21st century see the realization of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or George Orwell’s “1984,” the most dystopian visions of the 20th century?

For the moment, that seems farfetched. But from Moscow’s perspective, new commonalities with the U.S. are emerging. Even before his inauguration, Donald Trump presented the Russian leadership with a significant gift: He branded NATO obsolete and called into question the alliance’s principle of collective defense. Things could hardly be going better for Moscow. Maintaining control over Russia’s immediate vicinity is one of the country’s core interests while NATO’s eastward expansion is seen as a traumatic infringement of that claim. Putin has finally found an ally, in Washington of all places, in his battle against a world order that he has long attacked as being unipolar and unjust. Like Trump, Putin would like a world free of the West’s constant moralizing, a world in which might makes right. [Continue reading…]

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Soros says markets to slump with Trump, EU faces disintegration

 

Bloomberg reports: It’s tough to be gloomier than billionaire George Soros right now.

America has elected a would-be dictator as president, the European Union is disintegrating, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May won’t last long as her nation prepares to secede from the EU, and China is poised to become an even more repressive society, the investor told Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“It is unlikely that Prime Minister May is actually going to remain in power,” Soros said. She has a divided cabinet and base and Britons are in denial about the economic impact of Brexit, he said. [Continue reading…]

Watch the complete interview here.

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Trump promised to resign from his companies — but there’s no record he’s done so

By Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw, ProPublica, January 20, 2017

At a news conference last week, now-President Donald Trump said he and his daughter, Ivanka, had signed paperwork relinquishing control of all Trump-branded companies. Next to him were stacks of papers in manila envelopes — documents he said transferred “complete and total control” of his businesses to his two sons and another longtime employee.

Sheri Dillon, the Trump attorney who presented the plan, said that Trump “has relinquished leadership and management of the Trump Organization.” Everything would be placed in a family trust by Jan. 20, she said.

That hasn’t happened.

To transfer ownership of his biggest companies, Trump has to file a long list of documents in Florida, Delaware and New York. We asked officials in each of those states whether they have received the paperwork. As of 3:15 p.m. today, the officials said they have not.

Trump and his associates “are not doing what they said they would do,” said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “And even that was completely inadequate.”

ProPublica’s questions to the transition team were referred to an outside public relations firm, Hiltzik Strategies, which declined to comment. The president’s team did not allow reporters to view documents, which they said were legal records separating Trump from his eponymous business empire. Dillon’s law firm, Morgan Lewis, has not released the records and they declined further comment, saying it doesn’t comment on client issues.

ProPublica looked at more than a dozen of Trump’s largest companies, which are registered or incorporated in three states. Officials in New York and Delaware said documents are logged as soon as they are received. In Florida, officials told us there is typically a day or two before documents are logged into the system.

Here is what we found:

  • Business filings for Trump Organization LLC, Trump’s primary holding company, had not been changed, according to New York’s Department of State. Wollman Rink Operations LLC, which runs the Wollman Rink in Central Park through an agreement with New York City, hasn’t been updated either. Trump is listed as the sole authorized representative of the company. 

  • Ivanka Trump is still listed as the authorized officer on records for two entities related to the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., which the Trump family bought and turned into a hotel. No changes have been filed for either of the companies, which are registered in Delaware.

  • Documents on The Donald J. Trump Foundation, which Trump has said he would dissolve, haven’t been updated. The charitable foundation has been in a swirl of controversy over its collection and disbursement of funds and an active investigation by New York’s attorney general. (The foundation cannot legally dissolve until the investigation is complete, but the New York Attorney General’s office told ProPublica that Trump can resign as an officer at any time.)

  • In Delaware, where the majority of Trump’s businesses are registered, state officials told ProPublica that no amendments have been filed for four businesses tied to the Old Post Office and that the most recent filings for two businesses related to the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C., were made more than a year ago.

  • In Florida, no changes have been made for years to three key Trump businesses operating there: the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, the Mar-A-Lago Club, and DJT Holdings, which has controlling interest in most of Trump’s golf courses in the U.S. and abroad, according to the state’s Division of Corporations.

Even if Trump hands over his companies to a new trust, the plan fails to solve many of his bigger business conflicts, experts say. Terms of the trust that would insulate the president from the Trump Organization haven’t been made public. Trump’s decision not to divest his assets has also been heavily criticized by several former White House attorneys and ethics chiefs.

“What are the terms of the trust? Who is going to be the ethics monitor and what standards will he or she abide by?” said Norman Eisen, who served as the White House chief ethics lawyer under President Obama. “There are 1,000 unanswered questions.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.


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An inaugural celebration that rings hollow

David Frum writes: Every presidency is different, but inaugural coverage is always the same. Commentators congratulate Americans on the peaceful transition of power and intone solemn sentences about democratic renewal.

There is something unnerving about these reassurances, something overstated, even hysterical. When a British prime minister loses the confidence of the House of Commons and must suddenly trundle out of 10 Downing Street (as some six dozen of them have done since the job was invented in the 1740s; a few more than once), nobody marvels on television how wonderful it is that he or she doesn’t try to retain power by force of arms. Nobody in Denmark thinks it extraordinary when one party relinquishes power to another. Ditto New Zealand or Switzerland—all of them treat peaceful transfers of power as the developed world norm, like reliable electricity or potable water.

Americans so insistently celebrate the peaceful transfer of power precisely because they nervously recognize the susceptibility of their polity to violence. The presidential election of 1860 triggered one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history. The presidential election of 1876 very nearly reignited that war. Since 1900, two presidents have been murdered; six more — Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan — were either wounded by a would-be assassin or else escaped by inches. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s dark promise to return to a mythical past

Anne Applebaum writes: A green lawn, a white picket fence, a shining sun. Small children walk home from school; their mother, clad in an apron, waves to greet them. Father comes home in the evening from his well-paid job, the same one he has had all of his life. He greets the neighbors cheerfully — they are all men and women who look and talk like he does — and sits down to watch the 6 o’clock news while his wife makes dinner. The sun sets. Everyone sleeps well, knowing that the next day will bring no surprises.

In the back of their minds, all Americans know this picture. We’ve seen this halcyon vision in movies, we’ve heard it evoked in speeches and songs. We also know, at some level, what it conceals. There are no black people in the picture — they didn’t live in those kinds of neighborhoods in the 1940s or 1950s — and the Mexican migrants who picked the tomatoes for the family dinner are invisible, too. We don’t see the wife popping Valium in the powder room. We don’t see the post-war devastation in Europe and Asia that made U.S. industry so dominant, and U.S. power so central. We don’t see that half the world is dominated by totalitarian regimes. We don’t see the technological changes that are about to arrive and transform the picture.

We also know, at some level, that this vision of a simpler America — before civil rights, feminism, the rise of other nations, the Internet, globalization, free trade — can never be recovered, not least because it never really existed. But even if we know this, that doesn’t mean that the vision has no power. [Continue reading…]

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A Trump attack on the arts would be more than just symbolic

Philip Kennicott writes: For months now, the debate in the arts world has been: Will he really do it? Will Donald Trump be the president who finally gives the right wing what it has so vehemently craved for decades, the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts? A report in The Hill suggests that pessimists, who assumed the worst once it became clear that Trump’s election would likely empower organizations like the conservative Heritage Foundation, were right. He may indeed try to kill it.

And the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as cutting the federal appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The animus against these organizations has been so powerful for so long that defending them feels almost pro forma, a reflexive rhetorical blast into the headwinds of an anti-arts bias so deep that there’s little hope of changing anyone’s mind (“The NEA is welfare for cultural elitists,” declares the Heritage Foundation, sententiously).

Never mind the old arguments, still valid and cogent, but somehow threadbare from long use in what many people have long and fatalistically assumed is a losing battle. Despite the culture war clashes about art that some considered obscene more than a generation ago, the NEA has evolved into an organization that operates and has impact in every state, that has served returning veterans, bolstered state arts agencies and worked with all manner of groups and state and federal partners to build stronger and more resilient communities across the country. Never mind the role the NEH has played in the creation of documentaries and the education and enrichment of teachers who might not otherwise have a chance to escape the grinding cycle of teaching to the tests, which never stop coming. Never mind that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting creates the best and most enriching programming for children that is widely available without cost to the poor and the isolated.

No one knows what Trump will do until he actually does it, so perhaps someone will get his ear and deflect support for these cuts–so minimal in real dollar terms, so significant in symbolic impact. But let’s assume they’re coming. What do they tell us? [Continue reading…]

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Russian internet users say Trump gave a wonderful Soviet-era inauguration speech

Moscow Times reports: Donald Trump is now the president of the United States of America. At the time of this writing, Trump hasn’t even tweeted yet from his official “POTUS” account, though he already has millions of subscribers anxiously awaiting his next steps in the campaign to rescue the American hellscape he described in his inauguration speech on Friday.

Trump’s big day was headline news in Russia, of course, where you’ll find one of the few countries on Earth that overwhelmingly supported the Republican’s candidacy even when it was in its infancy.

Russian jokesters on Twitter certainly had their eye on President Trump’s inauguration speech, which more than a few Internet users compared to Communist rhetoric popular during the Soviet era. Trump’s focus on revitalizing American industry — particularly his vision for boosting industry and infrastructure by means of the state — struck many as the fervor of the New Soviet Man, the archetype of an industrious and devoted citizen in the U.S.S.R. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s demoralizing message to the children of America

This is a dark day for parents, teachers, and children across America.

As one president and his family, worthy of emulation, exit the White House, a man enters office about whom the best we can hope is that through his example he exerts as little influence as possible.

Of this much we can be reasonably sure: anyone who cites Donald Trump as the justification for their behavior most likely just did something that common decency could not otherwise justify.

In a recent interview Trump was asked whether he had any heroes and he responded by saying, “I don’t like the concept of heroes, the concept of heroes is never great,” and it makes sense that this would be the view of a man who never tires of telling everyone about his own greatness.

How could Trump express admiration for another person without implicitly calling into question his own capacities? How could he admit he looked up to anyone without placing himself in a position of inferiority?

Although on the question of heroes, Trump initially directs a nod of respect towards his father — “I’ve learnt a lot from my father … I learnt a lot about negotiation” — he immediately goes on to cast doubt on the foundation of learning.

What makes someone a great negotiator, or great salesman, or great politician is their “natural ability.” This, according to Trump, is “much more important” than experience.

No doubt this explains why Trump claims he advises himself and has little patience for intelligence briefings.

Now apply this philosophy to an education system. Schools would less be places of learning than warehouses for scouting talent. Pick out the few with natural ability and discard the rest.

Apply this to a country and the job of government becomes to brush away all unnecessary obstacles to success (regulations) so that those with natural ability are given free rein to shape our world as they see fit.

And in order to disguise the worst form of elitism as somehow serving the common good, repeatedly and loudly declare that all is done in the service of the nation.

The fact that Donald Trump is being sworn in as a president with lower approval ratings than any other in modern history might seem to indicate that even though he can now claim that title, “most powerful man in the world,” he does not in fact represent America — that he has arrived in Washington as an impostor. Indeed, the roles played by Russia and the FBI make it clear that Trump didn’t win the election by virtue of his natural ability.

Yet Trump’s candidacy was not a fabrication — it was a product of his own ambition and unrestrained grandiosity. And much as many Americans may now wish to disavow this president, he does in fact represent America by representing this country and its culture of confused values at its worst — through its celebration of celebrity; through its admiration of wealth; through its devaluation of decency; and through its lack of appreciation for the virtue of learning and the cultivation of wisdom.

 

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Intercepted Russian communications part of inquiry into Trump associates

The New York Times reports: American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.

It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November. The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.

The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Emoluments: Trump’s coming ethics trouble

Richard W. Painter, Laurence H. Tribe, Norman L. Eisen, and Joshua Matz write: Last week, President-elect Donald Trump’s lawyers issued a brief, largely unnoticed memo defending Trump’s plan to “separate” himself from his businesses. We believe that memo arbitrarily limits itself to a small portion of the conflicts it purports to address, and even there, presents claims that depart from precedent and common sense. Trump can convince a lot of people of a lot of things—but neither he nor his lawyers can explain away the ethics train wreck that will soon crash into the Oval Office.

It’s been widely acknowledged that, when Trump swears the Oath of Office, he will stand in violation of the Constitution’s foreign-emoluments clause. The emoluments clause forbids any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States]” from accepting any “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” (unless Congress explicitly consents).

By “emolument,” this provision means any benefit derived from dealing with a foreign government. It is well-settled that receipt of such emoluments is strictly prohibited for persons holding positions of trust with the U.S. government. A U.S. official need not also have an “office” with a foreign government in order to receive an emolument from it.

The Framers included this provision in the Constitution to guarantee that private entanglements with foreign states would not blur the loyalties of federal officials, above all the president. Yet that lesson seems lost on Trump, whose continued significant ownership stake in the Trump Organization forges an unbreakable bond between Trump and a global empire that will benefit or suffer in innumerable ways from its dealings with foreign governments. Trump’s actions in office will thus be haunted by the specter (and perhaps reality) of divided interests.

As we have argued, the only adequate solution to this and other conflicts of interest, taken by presidents of both parties for the past four decades, is divestiture into a truly blind trust or the equivalent. [Continue reading…]

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Are you not alarmed?

Charles Blow writes: I continue to be astonished that not enough Americans are sufficiently alarmed and abashed by the dangerous idiocies that continue to usher forth from the mouth of the man who will on Friday be inaugurated as president of the United States.

Toss ideology out of the window. This is about democracy and fascism, war and peace, life and death. I wish that I could write those words with the callous commercialism with which some will no doubt read them, as overheated rhetoric simply designed to stir agitation, provoke controversy and garner clicks. But alas, they are not. These words are the sincere dispatches of an observer, writer and citizen who continues to see worrisome signs of a slide toward the exceedingly unimaginable by a man who is utterly unprepared.

In a series of interviews and testimonies Donald Trump and his cronies have granted in the last several days, they have demonstrated repeatedly how destabilizing, unpredictable and indeed unhinged the incoming administration may be. Their comments underscore the degree to which this administration may not simply alter our democracy beyond recognition, but also potentially push us into armed conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Trump team sought Red Square-style tank and missile parade for inauguration

Huffington Post reports: Part of being a great president is showing off America’s military strength, according to President-elect Donald Trump.

The military “may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump told the Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday. “That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”

Trump spoke about his vision of military parades in vague terms, suggesting it was something he might oversee in the future. But according to several sources involved in his inaugural preparations, Trump has endeavored to ensure that his first day as commander-in-chief is marked by an unusual display of heavy military equipment.

During the preparation for Friday’s transfer-of-power, a member of Trump’s transition team floated the idea of including tanks and missile launchers in the inaugural parade, a source involved in inaugural planning told The Huffington Post. “They were legit thinking Red Square/North Korea-style parade,” the source said, referring to massive military parades in Moscow and Pyongyang, typically seen as an aggressive display of muscle-flexing. [Continue reading…]

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Trump threatens a good neighbor

Enrique Krauze writes: For Mexico, the United States has been a difficult neighbor, sometimes violent, almost always arrogant, almost never respectful, rarely cooperative. Mexico, on the other hand, has been a good neighbor to the United States.

To each offense, we have responded first with a gesture of noble resignation and then by searching for a practical resolution through a conciliatory openness of mind. Our positive attitude has allowed our two nations to live for almost 200 years in a generally peaceful atmosphere, though there have been tragic episodes and periods of tension. It is a record of tranquillity that few countries sharing a border can claim.

But this state of relative accord is now being menaced by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who brandished a rabidly anti-Mexican agenda during his campaign and once elected showed a disposition to act on the basis of his slanders. At his news conference on Wednesday, he vowed again that Mexico would pay for the wall he wants to build. It may well be time for Mexico to change its practice of using appeasement to cushion the damage of historical grievances. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s mission? To keep the U.S. in the fossil age

George Monbiot writes: Make America Wait Again. That is what Donald Trump’s energy policy amounts to. Stop all the clocks, put the technological revolution on hold, ensure that the transition from fossil fuels to clean power is delayed for as long as possible.

Trump is the president that corporate luddites have dreamed of: the man who will let them squeeze every last cent from their oil and coal reserves before they become worthless. They need him because science, technology and people’s demands for a safe and stable world have left them stranded. There is no fair fight that they can win, so their last hope lies with a government that will rig the competition.

To this end, Trump has appointed to his cabinet some of those responsible for a universal crime: inflicted not on particular nations or groups, but on everyone. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s classified nuclear briefing

Politico reports: If the recent past is a guide, Trump’s briefing [on how to destroy humanity] will occur at Blair House on Friday morning, where Trump plans to spend Thursday night. Like Clinton, Obama took his nuclear briefing on the morning of his 2009 inauguration, just before heading to an 8:30 a.m. church service.

The briefing itself does not involve grand nuclear strategy, nuclear experts and current and former U.S officials said. Presidents attend separate sessions in which military officials outline scenarios from all-out attack on Russia to war with China to limited strikes against rogue nations like North Korea.

Instead, Trump’s Friday briefing is meant to ensure that he understands how to quickly order a nuclear attack in the event of an emergency.

“The briefer is very, very military. It’s a military briefing,” Card said. “It’s not a briefing of the conscience. It’s by-the-book, it’s rote.”

“It’s kind of like how to use your remote control for the TV,” Card added.

The session guides a president in the use of the famous nuclear codes — which are not transmitted to missile silos, bombers and submarines but used, like a password, to verify the president’s identity when he sends a launch order to the Pentagon.

Timothy McBride, a former military aide in George H.W. Bush’s White House, said Scowcroft informed Clinton in their January 1993 briefing that he would be pulled aside in the U.S. Capitol building just after his swearing-in and presented with the nuclear codes.

Trump critics note with alarm that an American president does not need the approval of Congress, his cabinet or any other entity to order the use of nuclear weapons — although in theory, his defense secretary could refuse to transmit a launch order down the military chain of command. [Continue reading…]

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